'Send Your Love' addresses a lot of the issues you're talking about. When you sing a line like, "No religion but sex and music," it raises notions about what religion means in the West, what religion means in Islam, what people do in the name of religion and what could be done more productively in its name. At the same time the record is soaked in all kinds of religious imagery. So much of your writing is.
[Sting]: I've always been fascinated by religion. Although I don't belong to a denomination, I regard myself as highly religious. I just felt, in light of Sept. 11 and the subsequent struggle, that religion had a lot to answer for. And religion needed in the future to be redefined. I think it's been used in a very narrow political sense of closing down who we are. In other words, if you belong to my religion, then you are family, if you don't then you're not family - them and us, black and white, good and evil. People imagining that God looks like they do. Well I don't think God's an Episcopalian or a Catholic or Islamic or Jewish. I think He, She or It is bigger than all of that. And religion needs to address that. It shouldn't be so petty. There has to be a larger thought. So I had to redefine religion for myself. What are my religions? Music is one of my religions, where I can sense the infinite. And the other is love. Sexual love, romantic love. My relationship with my wife, for example, I regard as a devotional practice. It's a way of approaching eternity, infinity, the impossible things that we simply can't understand. Love gives us a window onto that. So the album is really about that - defining religion. I say a very polemic statement: "There's no religion but sex and music." This is my little polemic. It might embarrass some people, it might insult some people. I don't mean it to. I'm just saying for me this is what my religion is. God created both.
'Send Your Love' addresses a lot of the issues you're talking about. When you sing a line like, "No religion but sex and music," it raises notions about what religion means in the West, what religion means in Islam, what people do in the name of religion and what could be done more productively in its name. At the same time the record is soaked in all kinds of religious imagery. So much of your writing is.
[Sting]: I've always been fascinated by religion. Although I don't belong to a denomination, I regard myself as highly religious. I just felt, in light of Sept. 11 and the subsequent struggle, that religion had a lot to answer for. And religion needed in the future to be redefined. I think it's been used in a very narrow political sense of closing down who we are. In other words, if you belong to my religion, then you are family, if you don't then you're not family - them and us, black and white, good and evil. People imagining that God looks like they do. Well I don't think God's an Episcopalian or a Catholic or Islamic or Jewish. I think He, She or It is bigger than all of that. And religion needs to address that. It shouldn't be so petty. There has to be a larger thought. So I had to redefine religion for myself. What are my religions? Music is one of my religions, where I can sense the infinite. And the other is love. Sexual love, romantic love. My relationship with my wife, for example, I regard as a devotional practice. It's a way of approaching eternity, infinity, the impossible things that we simply can't understand. Love gives us a window onto that. So the album is really about that - defining religion. I say a very polemic statement: "There's no religion but sex and music." This is my little polemic. It might embarrass some people, it might insult some people. I don't mean it to. I'm just saying for me this is what my religion is. God created both.